This invention relates to communication systems in which a pair of stations, each having a transmitter and a receiver, communicate using modulated carrier signals. More particularly, this invention relates to compensation for carrier frequency differences between communicating stations in such a communication system. The present invention may be used, for example, in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)-based wireless local area network (WLAN) communication systems.
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a special form of multi-carrier modulation. Due to the inherent robustness of OFDM against multipath effects, OFDM is of increasing interest for mobile radio communication systems as FFT (Fast Fourier Transform)-based digital signal processing techniques advance. For example, IEEE 802.11a specifies the Physical Layer Entry for an OFDM system that provides a wireless LAN with data payload communication capabilities from 6 to 54 Mbits/sec in the Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (U-NII) frequency band. The IEEE 802.11a system uses 52 sub-carriers that are independently modulated using Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK), Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK), 16-Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (16-QAM) or 64-Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (64-QAM) associated with different coding rates for different data speeds.
Due to the multicarrier nature of OFDM-modulated signaling, the performance of an OFDM system may suffer severely from intercarrier interference if the carrier frequency offset between a transmitter in one station and a receiver in another station is sufficiently large. Although single-carrier signaling systems also suffer from such carrier frequency offset, a given amount of carrier frequency offset may degrade system performance to a much greater degree in an OFDM system than in a single-carrier system.
Numerous techniques have been devised to estimate and compensate for carrier frequency offset. Typically, those techniques employ digital signal processing algorithms in the receiver of a station. However, when such frequency estimation techniques are applied under realistic situations, with numerous other impairments including IQ mismatch, DC offsets, nonlinear distortion, local oscillator phase noise, and so on, they may be unable to provide adequate performance, at least without highly complicated implementations.